One Thousand Shards of Stone
by Optimum Ace
Summary: The natural order decays beneath the oppression of the artificially preserved Age of Fire, and the hollowing curse continues to spread. Fragments of the fractured world collide allowing mad phantoms to roam free and minds to come undone. Behold as the once great Havel the Rock writhes in the relentless cycle of death unto undeath. Come, and understand what it is to be hollow.


_One Thousand Shards of Stone_

Hundreds of stories existed describing the process of hollowing-of losing oneself to the madness of cyclical death. It remained, as ever, a scorched black spot of fate on the souls of all those left to roam in the dying light of the Age of Fire. Pitiless, it spared none from its ravages; in and of itself a fundamental force of the new world order, like time or the immutable power of souls.

It was, however, an entirely different experience to _become_ hollow, or at least _partly_ hollow. One might argue that amid the countless strands of tangled reality it was impossible to be _entirely_ anything. Dead in one world meant undead in another. A determined champion in Anor Londo, might be a murderous madman in Lothric. As the world neared its end and prepared to move on to the next age, time and space became increasingly fractured. These broken pieces collide and overlap violently, forcing traces of alternate wheres, whens, and whos to leech into one another.

Havel the Rock stood at the precipice of insanity, his mind awhirl with thoughts and memories both his own, yet not. He could remember deaths he had not died and lives he had not lived, each memory disjointed and cloying for his attention. Manic emotions coursed through the fibres of his being with puckering intensity. Bloodlust begged to be slaked, but a desperate morality pleaded deliverance from this desire. Overwhelming sadness threatened to swallow his very heart into unknown abyssal depths, yet a soaring pride pulled him skyward on wings of duty.

The former bishop cradled his head in his hands, and in that moment he forgot where he stood. Startled by the realization, Havel lifted his helmeted head and surveyed his surroundings for something familiar, head snapping left and right erratically. A vast ruin atop a lofty peak surrounded him, crumbling and long since succumbed to the world-pervasive entropy that spared neither flesh nor stone. The rock-armored warrior felt several layers deep in his own consciousness, looking through eyes which in turn looked through eyes that should have been his own. Been he here before?

Dreamer's fog teased the edges of his vision, images overlapping one another in a thousand different timelines. Still, Havel logically understood that _he_ -he as he was in that moment-stood amidst the ruins atop the mountain. Where was Gwyn, his beloved friend? Where were his brave and steadfast soldiers? Dead-long dead, in fact.

Havel knew this, how could he forget? He told himself that he had not forgotten, that the question had been philosophical. The Rock lied to himself in the same disconnected way one might lie to a stranger and accepted it as fact. Did that not attest to deepening madness? A question from another self-an unexpected self.

Havel ignored it.

An armored figure appeared by the stairs leading from the Great Belfry, and Havel suffered an overwhelming urge to kill this interloper. Yes, he needed to kill the knightly figure much like he killed the dragon whose corpse now adorned the ruins like a macabre trophy. Havel _had_ been the one to fell the wyrm, had he not? Had he not? He did not know for certain, but again he assured himself that none other could have done so.

The former bishop hefted his dragon tooth greathammer and rested it atop his shoulder, shrugging his stone greatshield up with the other arm. Odd, he did not remember retrieving his weapons. Had not his hands been empty but a moment ago when he cradled his face into them? As quickly as the questions bubbled to the surface, the Rock had forgotten he ever thought them at all. Too overwhelming was the force urging him to kill; it left room in his mind for little else.

Havel charged forward with a heavy, lumbering stride. The thick stone plates of his trusty armor granted a thunderous voice to his thudding footfalls. Raising his dragon fang, he lunged with unbelievable swiftness and brought the greathammer crashing down on his foe's head-or rather, what _should_ have been his foe's head.

The knightly-armored foe dove to their left, rolling over shoulder and rising nimbly back to their feet before Havel's greathammer even hit the decaying cobblestone floor. The impact pulverized the stone in a wide circle around the dragon fang's hammer head, and a sharp pain pierced Havel's side as the invading knight lunged and drove the point of their sword through the rock armor. It pierced the plate of hand-hewn stone as if it were made of tin, and fresh fury spilled into Havel's skull. How _dare_ this wanderer believe themselves capable of shattering the mighty Rock!

Havel twisted and whirled his greathammer to the side, the sudden blow striking true. It smashed the knight squarely in the back and sent them skittering across the stones like a flat pebble over the surface of a placid lake. They bounced once, twice, thrice before coming to rest and sinking to the floor. The Rock descended upon the knight mercilessly, determined for reasons he could not understand to dispatch his foe without delay. As Havel neared the downed combatant he raised the dragon fang again in preparation to smite his enemy.

It happened so fast; the knight lurched forward from prone and rolled behind Havel as the dragon fang came down, rendering his mighty blow a pointless waste of energy. Another searing pain accompanied the snap and crackle of splitting ribs- _his_ ribs. The former bishop realized he couldn't feel anything but an encroaching cold. He looked down to see the crimson-slicked tip of a sword jutting from the front of his breastplate. An abrupt blow to the back cast him free of the blade and delivered him face down to the floor.

A gust of wind rushed across the mountaintop and swept dust, ashes, and bits of pulverized stone into his face through the grate of his helm. They were little traces of the divine glory that had once been the Age of Fire, reduced then to little more than an annoyance. Is that what _he_ had become? A fractured relic of a bygone age acting more on instinct than will? This moment of clarity passed as quickly as it had come, swallowed by the abyss growing in his soul.

Before he realized it, the ground had disappeared beneath Havel. No, not quite; rather he no longer lay face down on the windswept stone. The Rock stood solidly upon his own two feet and the mountain's biting gale had been replaced by a hot, whipping wind. The clamor of combat oppressed the battlefield with deafening intensity. Had the former bishop been lost in thought in the throes of pitched combat?

A blast of dragon's fire further ahead erupted from the mouth of an airborne beast and broke against the earth like an ocean wave against a rocky shore. It sent another wash of hot wind against him, but Havel need not brace himself against the force while the resplendently armored silver knights beside him hunkered and dug in their heels.

"Bishop!" A voice called to him through the clatter of weapons and the roar of enraged dragons. Bishop? Not _former_ bishop? Yes, of course! He was Bishop Havel the Rock! Commander of a mighty legion of stone-plated warriors. "We must bolster the line! It wavers beneath the breath of the wyrms! Shall we to it, Lord Bishop?"

Havel waved his hand forward and the captain at his flank sounded the charge. Hundreds of knights in armor identical to the Rock's own surged forward from his back. He remembered then; Gwyn waged war on the Dragons for their place as rulers of the world. There could be no Age of Fire while the wyrms still infested the skies! The winged cretin and their magic need die so that the Fire could touch all corners of the earth.

Storming forward with his troops, Havel relished the quake of the land beneath the weight of their charge. As the knights of stone armor approached the front ranks, a volley of impossibly large arrows flew skyward from the silver knight archers in the rear. The heavy projectiles punctured dozens of holes in the webbing of the flapping creature's wings, effectively shredding them into useless ribbons of loose flesh.

A furious roar rippled across the fields like thunder as the dragon plummeted from the sky. It landed with bone-crushing force, kicking up a plume of dust thick as fog over a warm grave. A jet of dragon fire exploded from the dust and enveloped those nearest the cloud of dirt. When the flames dissipated, Havel's knights stood with the hard ridges of their stone-hewn armor glowing red from the heat, undaunted.

With a united battlecry, the bishop's stone knights fell upon the dragon; their blades carved its flesh and their hammers crushed its bones. Havel himself stood at the head of the mighty wyrm when finally it collapsed, spewing fire indiscriminately and frantically thrashing about at anything in which its talons could find purchase. Raising the dragon tooth above his head, the Rock brought his greathammer down on the dragon's skull.

The hammer's head did not find a dragon's skull, however. Instead, the dragon tooth fell upon a man-a knight of some irrelevant banner. A sickening crunch startled Havel as his victim's ribcage collapsed beneath the force of the overhead coup de grâce. The Rock stood there for a long moment, motionless and shocked, until the corpse dissolved into a pool of yellowish-white light.

Who had he then slain? Havel could not remember. Had not a moment ago he been in the throes of battle with the enemies of Gwyn and his kin? No, of course not. The glorious times had long since past when silver still gleamed and honor still won the day. Why, then, could he not remember where he stood? Surely the bishop-wait, _former_ bishop, right?-could not forget the reason he and the dead knight had quarreled?

Havel turned, studying his surroundings. A dark and nondescript network of catacombs stretched as far as the eye could see in all directions, which was to say not very far. The only illumination in the corridor glowed a deep, sinister red. It took the Rock a moment to realize that the glow emanated from his own body. His entire form-or as much as he could see without a mirror-glowed malevolently in the dark, his hands looking particularly translucent to his own eye. What vile sorcery could cause such an illusion? For what purpose did he burn like a dark spirit?

All of the scratching at the cocoon of his insanity split the shell surrounding his fractured mind. For a moment he peered through the cracks into the vast network of his broken psyche, horrified. A thousand different lives in a thousand different timelines played out before him, scrambling over one another to tell their tale of woe and descent into madness. Havel felt himself as a dying star, a small glimmer of light in a vast ocean of darkness calling across the endless loneliness to distant kin who had succumbed to silence long ago.

The once great Havel the Rock had been sundered by the unraveling world, existing only as one thousand shards of stone across the floating fragments of the world he helped to break. Through the veil he glimpsed the root of entropy-the truth as pure as truth could ever be: the Age of Fire had always been meant to die. Gwyn and his followers knowingly usurped the natural order and crowned themselves Lords of Cinder. As such they would remain, cursed to exist as changeless and covetous shells suitable only as kindling for the Fire they exalted. Surrounded, were they, by an eternally growing emptiness of the flesh; friends and followers were drained of their humanity and rendered _hollow_. Hollow like their kingdoms. Hollow like their subjects. Hollow like their promises. Hollow like their memories as the Fire faded and gave way to an Age of Dark.

Tears spilled down Havel's cheeks as guilt and sorrow overwhelmed him. Even as the truth escaped him as if it had never been seen, the feeling of devastation persisted a moment longer. The Rock felt dazed by the gravity of his confusion all the while drowning in incomprehensible grief.

The former bishop cradled his head in his hands, and in that moment he forgot where he stood. Startled by the realization, Havel lifted his helmeted head and surveyed his surroundings for something familiar, head snapping left and right erratically. A vast ruin atop a lofty peak surrounded him, crumbling and long since succumbed to the world-pervasive entropy that spared neither flesh nor stone. The rock-armored warrior felt several layers deep in his own consciousness, looking through eyes which in turn looked through eyes that should have been his own.

Been he here before?


End file.
